Yet again, this was so much more charming under the neon glow of your preferred cyberpunk dystopia.

There is something particularly nauseous about the nerd-mercs: all the base charm of Pinkertons; but with the whole “they hoard exploits that make us all less safe” problem that is attached to any refusal to disclose in order to retain attack capability, no matter how noble you think it is(and in this case, the answer is “not very”).

It’s even uglier given the (extremely broad; for all the whining about ‘going dark’) scope of what someone with legal authority and a warrant(or not; it’s one area where telcos actually embrace customer service) can learn without any access to exploits; purely through the combination of “lawful intercept” features and traffic/metadata analysis that just requires service provider logs, not malware.

One cannot exclude all possible cases where The Good Guys totally can’t do this one without malware; but in a great many cases there is an alternate solution; and the malware option is just more dangerous; and a lot easier for someone exceeding their lawful authority to do quietly and unilaterally; which is not something we need, at all, even slightly.